County launches comprehensive plan process

Sarasota County already has some residents wondering about the validity on public input for changes to the comprehensive plan when it failed to have a Q&A at last night's meeting.

The meeting featured an interactive polling session with the 50-some people who attended the county's meeting about the comprehensive plan updating process. Ida Cuthbertson, a Sarasota County resident, was surprised there was no Q&A section at last night’s meeting, and she wasn’t the only one. On one of the category boards, where people could write down ideas, someone scribbled “polling isn’t public input.”

County staff gave a presentation on the process of the county’s updates for the next year and how public input would be incorporated into the plan changes via public comment, meetings and online interactions.

“This is not a county plan, this is a community plan,” said Allen Parsons, a planning manager for the county.

Jane Grogg, manager of the county's office of neighborhood services, directed a live polling session with meeting participants. Using clickers, Grogg surveyed the crowd on its demographics and also its projections about the county.

Grogg used these polls to communicate the demographics of Sarasota County today versus 2006, when the comprehensive plan was last updated. For example, when the plan was updated before using 2004 data, the county was getting on average 20 new residents per day. Now, the average is only five, and less than half of the county’s population participates in the workforce.

“This is a concern for economic development,” Grogg said.

The difference in statistics from 2006 demonstrates why the county needs to update the plan, she said. The county also wants to improve the clarity, purpose and intent of the plan because the current version is hard to look through and cumbersome—on paper, it’s about 12 pounds.

The county will examine 7 different categories of topics, spending about two months on each. It will record all meetings and public workshops during this time, and post all the recordings and documents on the county’s webpage dedicated to the comprehensive plan updates.